The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  But most potent of all, he had returned and had been welcomed by Saya—Saya of the swift feet and slender limbs, whose smile roused strange emotions in Burl’s breast.

  It was the adoring gaze of Saya that had roused Burl to this last pitch of rashness. Months before, the Clotho spider in the hemispherical silk castle of the gruesome decorations had killed and eaten one of the men of the tribe. Burl and the spider’s victim had been together when the spider appeared, and the first faint gray light of morning barely silhouetted the shaggy, horrible creature as it leaped from ambush behind a toadstool toward the fear-strick­en pair.

  Its attenuated legs were outstretched, its mandibles gaped wide, and its jaws clashed horribly as it formed a black blotch in mid­air against the lightening sky.

  Burl had fled, screaming, when the other man was seized. Now, however, he was leading half a dozen trembling men toward the inverted dome in which the spider dozed. Two or three of them bore spears like Burl himself, but they bore them awk­wardly and timorously. Burl himself was possessed by a strange, fictitious courage. It was the utter recklessness of youth, cou­pled with the eternal masculine desire to display prowess before a chosen female.

  The wavering advance came to a halt. Most of the nearly naked men stopped from fear, but Burl stopped to invoke his newly discovered inner self that had fur­nished him with such marvelous plans. Quite accidentally he had found that if he persistently asked himself a question, some sort of answer came from within.

  Now he gazed up from a safe distance and asked himself how he and the others were to slay the Clotho spider. The nest was some forty feet from the ground, on the undersurface of a shelf of rock. There was sheer open space beneath it, but it was firmly held to its support by long, silken cables that curled to the upper side of the rock-shelf, clinging to the stone.

  Burl gazed, and presently an idea came to him. He beckoned to the others to fol­low him, and they did so, their knees knocking together from their fright. At the slightest alarm they would flee, screaming in fear, but Burl did not plan that there should be any alarm.

  He led them to the rear of the singular rock formation, up the gently sloping side, and toward the precipitous edge. He drew near the point where the rock fell away. A long, tentacle-like silk cable curled up over the edge of a little promontory of stone that jutted out into nothingness.

  Burl began to feel oddly cold, and some­thing of the panic of the other men com­municated itself to him. This was one of the anchoring cables that held the spi­der’s castle secure. He looked and found others, six or seven in all, which performed the task of keeping the shaggy, beastly ogre’s home from falling to the ground below.

  His idea did not desert him, however, and he drew back, to whisper orders to his followers. They obeyed him solely because they were afraid, and he spoke in an au­thoritative tone, but they did obey, and brought a dozen heavy boulders of perhaps forty pounds weight each.

  Burl grasped one of the silken cables at its end and tore it loose from the rock for a space of perhaps two yards. His flesh crawled as he did so, but something within him drove him on. Then, while beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead—in­duced by nothing less than cold, physical fear—he tied the boulder to the cable. The first one done, he felt emboldened, and made a second fast, and a third.

  One of his men stood near the edge of the rock, listening in agonized apprehen­sion. Burl had soon tied a heavy stone to each of the cables he saw, and as a matter of fact, there was but one of them he failed to notice. That one had been covered by the flaking mold that took the place of grass upon the rocky eminence,

  There were several of the boulders for which there was no use left upon the prom­ontory, but Burl did not attempt to dou­ble the weights on the cables, He took his followers aside and explained his plan in whispers. Quaking, they agreed, and, trem­bling, they prepared to carry it out.

  One of them stationed himself beside each of the boulders, Burl at the largest. He gave a signal, and half a dozen ripping, tearing sounds broke the sullen silence of the day. The boulders clashed and clat­tered down the rocky side of the precipice, tearing—perhaps “peeling”—the cables from their adhesion to the stone. They shot into open space and jerked violently at the half-globular nest, which was wrenched from its place by the combined impetus of the six heavy weights,

  Burl had flung himself upon his face to watch what he was sure would be the death of the spider as it fell forty feet and more, imprisoned in its heavily weighted home. His eyes sparkled with triumph as he saw the ghastly, trophy-laden house swing out from the cliff. Then he gasped in terror.

  One of the cables had not been discov­ered. That single cable held the spider’s castle from a fall, though it had been torn from its anchorage, and now dangled heavily on its side in mid air. A convulsive struggle seemed to be going on within.

  Then one of the arch-like doors opened, and the spider emerged, evidently in ter­ror, and confused by the light of day, but still venomous and still deadly. It found but a single of its anchoring cables intact, that leading to the cliff top hard by Burl’s head.

  The spider sprang for this single cable, and its legs grasped the slender thread eagerly while it began to climb rapidly up toward the cliff top.

  As with all the creatures of Burl’s time, its first thought was of battle, not flight, and it came up the thin cord with its poison fangs unsheathed and its mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair upon its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity, and the horrible, thin legs moved with des­perate haste as it advanced to meet and wreak vengeance upon the cause of its sudden alarm.

  Burl’s followers fled, uttering shrieks of fear, and Burl started to his feet, in the grip of a terrible panic. Then his hand struck one of the heavy boulders. Exerting every ounce of his strength, he pushed it over the cliff just where the cable ap­peared above the edge. For the fraction of a second there was silence, and then the indescribable sound of an impact against a soft body.

  There was a gasping cry, and a moment later the curiously muffled clatter of the boulder striking the earth below. Somehow, the sound suggested that the boulder had struck first upon some soft object.

  A faint cry came from the bottom of the hill. The last of Burl’s men was leaping to a hiding-place among the mushrooms of the forest, and had seen the sheen of shin­ing armor just before him. He cried out and waited for death, but only a delicately formed wasp rose heavily into the air, bearing beneath it the more and more feebly struggling body of a giant cricket.

  Burl had stood paralyzed, deprived of the power of movement, after casting the boul­der over the cliff. That one action had taken the last ounce of his initiative, and if the spider had hauled itself over the rocky edge and darted toward him, slaver­ing its thick spittle and uttering sounds of mad fury, Burl would not even have screamed as it seized him. He was like a dead thing. But the oddly muffled sound of the boulder striking the ground below brought back hope of life and power of movement.

  He peered over the cliff. The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, still freighted with its gruesome trophies, but on the ground below a crushed and horri­bly writhing form was moving in convul­sions of rage and agony.

  Long, hairy legs worked desperately from a body that was no more than a mass of pulped flesh. A ferocious jaw tried to clamp upon something—and there was no other jaw to meet it. An evil-smelling, sticky liquid exuded from the mangled thing upon the earth, writhing, moving in terri­ble contortions of torment.

  Presently an ant drew near and extend­ed inquisitive antennae at the helpless monster wounded to death. A shrill stridulation sounded out, and three or four other foot-long ants hastened up to wait pa­tiently just outside the spider’s reach un­til its struggles should have lessened enough to make possible the salvage of flesh from the perhaps still-living creature for the ant city a mile away.

  And Burl, up on the cliff top, danced and gesticulated in triumph. He had killed the Clotho spider, whic
h had slain one of the tribes-men four months before. Glory was his. All the tribes-men had seen the spi­der living. Now he would show them the spider dead. He stopped his dance of tri­umph and walked down the hill in haughty grandeur. He would reproach his timid followers for fleeing from the spider, leav­ing him to kill it alone.

  Quite naively Burl assumed that it was his place to give orders and that of the others to obey. True, no one had attempted to give orders before, or to enforce their execution, but Burl had reached the emi­nently wholesome conclusion that he was a wonderful person whose wishes should be respected.

  Burl, filled with fresh notions of his own importance, strutted on toward the hiding-place of the tribe, growing more and more angry with the other men for having de­serted him. He would reproach them, would probably beat them. They would be afraid to protest, and in the future would un­doubtedly be afraid to run away.

  Burl was quite convinced that running away was something he could not tolerate in his followers. Obscurely—and conveni­ently in the extreme back of his mind—he reasoned that not only did a larger num­ber of men present at a scene of peril in­crease the chances of coping with the dan­ger, but they also increased the chances that the victim selected by the dangerous creature would be another than himself.

  Burl’s reasoning was unsophisticated, but sound; perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless effective. He grew quite furious with the deserters. They had run away! They had fled from a mere spider.

  A shrill whine filled the air, and a ten-inch ant dashed at Burl with its mandibles extended threateningly. Burl’s path had promised to interrupt the salvaging work of the insect, engaged in scraping shreds of flesh from the corselet of one of the smaller beetles slain the previous night. The ant dashed at Burl like an infuriated fox terrier, and Burl scurried away in un­dignified retreat. The ant might not be dangerous, but bites from its formic-acid-poisoned mandibles were no trifles.

  Burl came to the tangled thicket of mushrooms in which his tribes-folk hid. The entrance was tortuous and difficult to penetrate, and could be blocked on occa­sion with stones and toadstool pulp. Burl made his way toward the central clearing, and heard as he went the sound of weep­ing, and the excited chatter of the tribes-people.

  Those who had fled from the rocky cliff had returned with the news that Burl was dead, and Saya lay weeping beneath an overshadowing toadstool. She was not yet the mate of Burl, but the time would come when all the tribe would recognize a status dimly different from the usual tribal rela­tionship.

  Burl stepped into the clearing, and straightway cuffed the first man he came upon, then the next and the next. There was a cry of astonishment, and the next second instinctive, fearful glances at the entrance to the hiding-place.

  Had Burl fled from the spider, and was it following? Burl spoke loftily, saying that the spider was dead, that its legs, each one the length of a man, were still, and its fierce jaws and deadly poison-fangs harm­less forevermore.

  Ten minutes later he was leading an in­credulous, awed little group of pink-skinned people to the spot below the cliff where the spider actually lay dead, with the ants busily at work upon its remains.

  And when he went back to the hiding-place he donned again his great cloak that was made from the wing of a magnificent moth, slain by the flames of the purple hills, and sat down in splendor upon a crumbling toadstool, to feast upon the glances of admiration and awe that were sent toward him. Only Saya held back shy­ly, until he motioned for her to draw near, when she seated herself at his feet and gazed up at him with unutterable adora­tion in her eyes.

  But while Burl basked in the radiance of his tribe’s admiration, danger was draw­ing near them all. For many months there had been strange red mushrooms growing slowly here and there all over the earth, they knew. The tribes-folk had speculated about them, but forbore tasting them because they were strange, and strange things were usually dangerous and often fatal.

  Now those red growths had ripened and grown ready to emit their spores. Their rounded tops had grown fat, and the tough skin grew taut as if a strange pressure were being applied from within. And to­day, while Burl luxuriated in his position of feared and admired great man of his tribe, at a spot a long distance away, upon a hilltop, one of the red mushrooms burst. The spores inside the taut, tough skin shot all about as if scattered by an explosion, and made a little cloud of reddish, impal­pable dust, which hung in the air and moved slowly with the sluggish breeze.

  A bee droned into the thin red cloud of dust, lazily and heavily flying back toward the hive. But barely had she entered the tinted atmosphere when her movements became awkward and convulsive, effortful and excited. She trembled and twisted in midair in a peculiar fashion, then drooped to the earth, while her abdomen moved violently.

  Bees, like almost all insects, breathe through spiracles on the under surfaces of their abdomens. This bee had breathed in some of the red mushroom’s spores. She thrashed about desperately upon the toad­stools on which she had fallen, struggling for breath, for life.

  After a long time she was still. The cloud of red mushroom spores had strangled or poisoned her. And everywhere the red fringe grew, such explosions were taking place, one by one, and everywhere the red clouds hung in the air; creatures were breathing them in and dying in convul­sions of strangulation.

  CHAPTER II

  THE JOURNEY

  Darkness. The soft, blanketing night of the age of fungoids had fallen over the earth, and there was blackness everywhere that was not good to see. Here and there, however, dim, bluish lights glowed near the ground. There an intermittent glow showed that a firefly had wandered far from the rivers and swamps above which most of his kind now congregated. Now a faintly luminous ball of fire drifted above the steaming, mois­ture-sodden earth. It was a will-o’-the-wisp, grown to a yard in diameter.

  From the low-hanging banks of clouds that hung perpetually overhead, large, warm raindrops fell ceaselessly. A drop, a pause, and then another drop, adding to the already dank moisture of the ground below.

  The world of fungus growths flourished on just such dampness and humidity. It seemed as if the toadstools and mush­rooms could be heard, swelling and grow­ing large in the darkness. Rustlings and stealthy movements sounded furtively through the night, and from above the heavy throb of mighty wing-beats was con­tinuous.

  The tribe was hidden in the midst of a tangled copse of toadstools too thickly in­terwoven for the larger insects to pene­trate, Only the little midgets hid in its recesses during the night-time, and the smaller moths during the day.

  About and among the bases of the toad­stools, however, where their spongy stalks rose from the humid earth, small beetles roamed, singing cheerfully to themselves in deep bass notes. They were small and round, some six or eight inches long, and their bellies were pale gray.

  And as they went about they emitted sounds which would have been chirps had they been other than low as the low­est tone of a harp. They were truffle-beetles, in search of the dainty tidbits on which epicures once had feasted.

  Some strange sense seemed to tell them when one of half a dozen varieties of truffle was beneath them, and they paused in their wandering to dig a tunnel straight down. A foot, two feet, or two yards, all was the same to them. In time they would come upon the morsel they sought and would remain at the bottom of their tem­porary home until it was consumed. Then another period of wandering, singing their cheerful song, until another likely spot was reached and another tunnel begun.

  In a tiny, open space in the center of the toadstool thicket the tribes-folk slept with the deep notes of the truffle beetles in their ears. A new danger had come to them, but they had passed it on to Burl with a new and childlike confidence and considered the matter settled. They slept, while beneath a glowing mushroom at one side of the clearing Burl struggled with his new problem. He squatted upon the ground in the dim radiance of the shining toadstool, his moth-wing cloak wrapped about him, his spear in his hand, and his twin golden
plumes of the moth’s antennae bound to his forehead. But his face was downcast as a child’s.

  The red mushrooms had begun to burst. Only that day, one of the women, seek­ing edible fungus for the tribal larder, had seen the fat, distended globule of the red mushroom. Its skin was stretched taut, and glistened in the light.

  The woman paid little or no attention to the red growth. Her ears were attuned to catch sounds that would warn her of danger while her eyes searched for tid­bits that would make a meal for the tribe, and more particularly for her small son, left behind at the hiding-place,

  A ripping noise made her start up, alert on the instant. The red envelope of the mushroom had split across the top, and a thick cloud of brownish-red dust was spurting in every direction. It formed a pyramidal cloud some thirty feet in height, which enlarged and grew thinner with minor eddies within itself.

  A little yellow butterfly with wings barely a yard from tip to tip, flapped lazily above the mushroom-covered plain. Its wings beat the air with strokes that seemed like playful taps upon a friendly element. The butterfly was literally in­toxicated with the sheer joy of living. It had emerged from its cocoon barely two hours before, and was making its maiden flight above the strange and wonderful world. It fluttered carelessly into the red-brown cloud of mushroom spores.

  The woman was watching the slowly changing form of the spore-mist. She saw the butterfly enter the brownish dust, and then her eyes became greedy. There was something the matter with the butterfly. Its wings no longer moved lazily and gently. They struck out in frenzied, hysterical blows that were erratic and wild. The little yellow creature no longer floated lightly and easily, but dashed here and there, wildly and without purpose, seeming to be in its death-throes.

  It crashed helplessly against the ground and lay there, moving feebly. The woman hurried forward. The wings would be new fabric with which to adorn herself, and the fragile legs of the butterfly contained choice meat. She entered the dust-cloud.